Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies

G.G. Allin was a musician and performance artist who was the human embodiment of everything dangerous, threatening, and unwholesome about punk rock, with absolutely none of its redeeming qualities. A true folk anti-hero. A bit of a cunt.

I was given a VHS copy of Hated back in the day and have always kept a copy since. It’s one of those films that you have to show people just to freak them, to show them what fucked up really means. But also, as a reminder of how to not give a fuck. Hated is a chronicle of his last tour, on the run from the cops, naked and high.

SPOILER ALERT: He dies in the end.

Allin’s music was a fuzzy, incoherent blare that made the Ramones sound baroque by comparison, featuring lyrics that openly celebrated degradation, rape, and murder, and his performances (which rarely lasted more than ten or 15 minutes) usually found him far gone on drugs and alcohol, naked and rolling about in his own feces when not attempting to physically attack the audience.

In short, Allin was not a musician so much as a one-man freak show, and he won a small but loyal audience as perhaps the most singularly perverse sociological phenomenon of his day before dying of a drug overdose on June 28, 1993 (failing to make good on his pledge to take his own life on stage).